Code of Conduct for Scientists Who Engage in Advocacy
The AAAS hosted a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation to address the issue of scientists expressing their opinions to influence an action, such as a political process. The results of this workshop can be downloaded from this web page. The bottom line is the Code of Conduct for Advocacy in Science by Nicholas […]
How much time do the academics spend reading the literature?
JISC Collections funded a study to examine the values of libraries to UK academics. The result “UK Scholarly Reading and the Value of Library Resources: Summary Results of the Study Conducted Spring 2011” has been published. Here is a link to the PDF. From p. 8, “Of the 448 hours per year spent on scholarly […]
“Cold” equivalent potential temperature?
As scientists, we need to be precise in our writing. Evgeni Fedorovich at the University of Oklahoma has tried to keep me honest about writing about “cold temperatures”. Know that the air can be “cold” or “warm”, but temperatures are “high” or “low.” I want to take this argument one step further. It makes no […]
Past or Present Tense?
Which is correct? A. Wetzel et al. (2004) show a negative correlation between snow density and air temperature that explains 52% of the variance. B. Wetzel et al. (2004) showed a negative correlation between snow density and air temperature that explains 52% of the variance. The difference is that A uses the present tense “show”, […]
The importance of proper citation
Just recently I discovered a published article that neglected to cite the whole field of the topic that they were investigating. The article did have citations to the statistical methods and other papers that were related to their work, but not a single paper had been cited that had performed the same statistical analyses that […]
